Stats

[Derakon]

Spellbooks likely became less common because they were predominantly showing up in guaranteed-good drops, which are now more diverse due to the inclusion of those now-too-common good consumables.

Make one thing more common, it makes everything else less common...

[Magnate]

Spellbooks likely became less common because they were predominantly showing up in guaranteed-good drops, which are now more diverse due to the inclusion of those now-too-common good consumables.

Make one thing more common, it makes everything else less common...

Of course. Before OF_GOOD, spellbooks were about the only non-wearables available from "good" drops, so of course they'd be rarer.

Yes, balancing is difficult. I don't want to flood the dungeon with ego items when scaling back the consumables. And I don't want to get into too much detail balancing affixes when there are so many planned changes to monster distribution and combat! But at least we have something vaguely playable in the meantime.

@buzzkill: thanks ;-)

[fizzix]

With regard to dungeon books, I recommend we keep the current probs for MB8 and MB9 as exist in Vanilla.

Namely:
There should be roughly a 94% chance of finding M/PB9 by clearing every level once.
There should be a near 100% chance of finding M/PB8 by clearing every level once.

This test is easy to run in wiz-stats and I can rebalance this whenever you want me to (it will constantly need readjusting as we continually adjust other parameters)

Not being able to find M/B9 as a mage or a priest is not much fun.

There will still be a problem of too many copies of books 5,6 and 7 showing up. But I don't think that's resolvable except by making the dungeon books artifacts.

[Derakon]

There will still be a problem of too many copies of books 5,6 and 7 showing up. But I don't think that's resolvable except by making the dungeon books artifacts.

Which would be great if for no other reason than so I only have to throw away Holy Infusions once.

[Magnate]

Which would be great if for no other reason than so I only have to throw away Holy Infusions once.

It's on the list. Since it will mean yet more rebalancing (another ten base objects gone), it might as well be sooner rather than later.

[Magnate]

Hit/dam stats

Here are the graphs for to-hit and to-dam values. They are, as you would expect, very similar in shape. Overall they show that v4 produces significantly lower hit and dam values than V - the area between the two lines is probably about 50% of the total. Of course, V's generation is not open-ended, so values over 35 are never generated. v4 generates a tiny number of values up in the 40s and early 50s, until it hits the hard cap in object.h - but for some reason only for to-dam (it never generates to-hit over +40). This may or may not unbalance the endgame - we'll see when somebody gets there.

Two things to bear in mind about these graphs:

1. They include all wearable items, including rings of accuracy/damage/slaying/reckless attacks, gloves of slaying/power etc.

2. They don't show the data points for +0 (because that renders the graphs useless). v4 generates 29% more items with +0 to-dam and 35% more items with +0 to-hit - but those percentages are deflated by the presence of all the armour items. When I construct the query to distinguish between weapons and armour, I suspect we'll find that v4 produces nearly twice as many +0 weapons.

[fizzix]

Cool thanks. What are your opinions on these. Do you think v4 is too stingy, or just about right?

[Magnate]

Cool thanks. What are your opinions on these. Do you think v4 is too stingy, or just about right?

I don't have a view yet - I fear the worst of both. People will be stuck with weapons with less than +10 for way too long, and will then suddenly find something with +40 and everyone will complain that it's horribly broken.

The first thing I thought was that we really need to make +dam give diminishing returns - but since that's the whole reason why we don't just move to O-combat, that's a non-starter. Balancing generation would be easier, but the cost in terms of intuitiveness would be too high.

I do think we should start making some combat changes before worrying too much about fine-tuning ego balance though. Things like reworked to-hit and critical hits could make quite a big difference.

It's probably also worth separating out on-weapon and off-weapon hit/dam. I'll have a word with myshkin - it might be easiest to do this at collection time with separate tables, rather than trying to set up queries to do it.

[Magnate]

Fortunately all the weapons are contiguous in object.txt - index numbers 30 to 122 inclusive. So it was easy to separate them out. The graphs look roughly the same shape as before, but the conclusions are worse: it means that hit/dam on nonweapons is almost identical (as we would expect), but v4 is much meaner with weapon bonuses. In particular, v4 generates 15x as many weapons with +0 to hit, and 13x as many with +0 to-dam. (Again, I didn't show these in order not to compress the graphs.)

Now, this difference is offset quite a lot by the fact that +0 weapons in v4 can have slays, brands, extra dice and all sorts of other niceties which +0 weapons in V cannot have. But I don't think that quite makes up for the meanness. I'm not sure that this is something stats can test (I don't think we can track the hit/dam on weapons with specific flags - I'll ask myshkin), so we'll have to see how it plays.

[Jungle_Boy]

What seems to happen to me in my games is that I am stuck with a crappy +2 or +3 weapon, then I get lucky and find an artifact with +10 dam which is much better than anything else coming along for quite some time. I'm not sure how long cause I always end up dead before then but I would say down to about 2000 ft at ealst (that's where I die)